TO SAY THAT Richard Matheson invented the horror story would be as ridiculous as it would be to say that Elvis Presley invented rock’n’roll — what, the purist would scream, about Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Stick McGhee, the Robins and a dozen others? The same is true in the horror genre, which is the equivalent of rock’n’roll — a quick hit to the head that bobs your nerves and makes hurt so good.

Before Matheson came dozens, going back to the author of the Grendel story, to Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft . . . But, like rock’n’roll, or any other genre that skates across the nerve endings, horror must constantly regenerate and renew or die.

In the early 1950s, when the Weird Tales magazine was dying its slow death and Robert Bloch, horror’s greatest writer at the time, had turned to psychological tales (and Fritz Leiber had fallen oddly silent) and the genre was languishing in the horse latitudes, Richard Matheson came like a bolt of pure ozone lightning.

He single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps that were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories. What do I remember about them? I remember what they taught me; the same thing that rock’s most recent regenerator, Bruce Springsteen, articulates in one of his songs, no retreat, baby, no surrender. I remember that Matheson would never give ground. When you thought it had to be over, that your nerves couldn’t stand any more, that was when Matheson turned on the afterburners. He wouldn’t quit. He was relentless. The baroque intonations of Lovecraft, the perfervid prose of the pulps, the sexual innuendoes, were all absent. You were faced with so much pure drive that only rereadings showed Matheson’s wit, cleverness, and control.

When people talk about genre, I guess they mention my name first, but without Richard Matheson I wouldn’t be around. He is as much my father as Bessie Smith was Elvis Presley’s mother. He came when he was needed, and these stories hold all their original hypnotic appeal.

Be warned: You are in the hands of a writer who asks no quarter and gives none. He will wring you dry. . . and when you close this volume he will leave you with the greatest gift a writer can give: he will leave you wanting more.

© Stephen King This is an edited version of Stephen King’s new introduction to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

Extract from I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson

It was almost noon. Robert Neville was in his hothouse collecting a basketful of garlic.

In the beginning it had made him sick to smell garlic in such quantity; his stomach had been in a state of constant turmoil. Now the smell was in his house and in his clothes, and sometimes he thought it was even in his flesh. He hardly noticed it at all.

When he had enough bulbs, he went back to the house and dumped them on the drainboard of the sink. As he flicked the wall switch, the light flickered, then flared into normal brilliance. A disgusted hiss passed his clenched teeth. The generator was at it again. He’d have to get out that damned manual again and check the wiring. And, if it were too much trouble to repair, he’d have to install a new generator.

Angrily he jerked a high-legged stool to the sink, got a knife, and sat down with an exhausted grunt.

First he separated the bulbs into the small, sickle-shaped cloves. Then he cut each pink, leathery clove in half, exposing the fleshy center buds. The air thickened with the musky, pungent odour. When it got too oppressive, he snapped on the air-conditioning unit and suction drew away the worst of it.

Now he reached over and took an icepick from its wall rack. He punched holes in each clove half, then strung them all together with wire until he had about twenty-five necklaces.

In the beginning he had hung these necklaces over the windows. But from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulchre, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

When he was finished stringing the garlic cloves, he went outside and nailed them over the window boarding, taking down the old strings, which had lost most of their potent smell.

He had to go through this process twice a week. Until he found something better, it was his first line of defence.

Defence? he often thought. For what? All afternoon he made stakes.

He lathed them out of thick dowelling, band-sawed into 9in lengths. These he held against the whirling emery stone until they were as sharp as daggers.

It was tiresome, monotonous work, and it filled the air with hot-smelling wood dust that settled in his pores and got into his lungs and made him cough.

Yet he never seemed to get ahead. No matter how many stakes he made, they were gone in no time at all. Dowelling was getting harder to find, too. Eventually he’d have to lathe down rectangular lengths of wood. Won’t that be fun? he thought irritably.

It was all very depressing and it made him resolve to find a better method of disposal. But how could he find it when they never gave him a chance to slow down and think? As he lathed, he listened to records over the loudspeaker he’d set up in the bedroom — Beethoven’s Third, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies. He was glad he’d learnt early in life, from his mother, to appreciate this kind of music. It helped to fill the terrible void of hours.

From four o’clock on, his gaze kept shifting to the clock on the wall. He worked in silence, lips pressed into a hard line, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his eyes staring at the bit as it gnawed away the wood and sent floury dust filtering down to the floor.

Four-fifteen. Four-thirty. It was a quarter to five.

In another hour they’d be at the house again, the filthy bastards. As soon as the light was gone.

The Gollancz top ten

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a marriage of sci-fi and horror, has been called “a logical take on vampirism”. It is one of Gollancz’s new series “the ten greatest sci-fi novels of all time”, with new introductions by contemporary writers.

The other books in the series are: The Dispossessed, by Ursula le Guin; The Stars my Destination, Alfred Bester; Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes; The Forever War, Joe Haldeman; Cities in Flight, James Blish; Ubik, Philip K. Dick; Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny; Gateway, Frederik Pohl; The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut.

All ten books are published by next month by Orion, £7.99, offer £7.59, call 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict